Power BI Essentials

At Course Completion

This expert-led, hands-on course is designed to help you build a strong foundation in Power BI, allowing you to confidently clean, model, visualize, and share data. By the end of the course, you will be able to:

Connect, transform, and prepare data using Power Query Editor, ensuring accuracy and consistency before analysis.
Build relationships between data tables, understanding when to use one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many relationships.
Write basic DAX calculations to create custom measures, calculated columns, and tables for more meaningful insights.
Design interactive reports with slicers, filters, hierarchies, and tooltips to improve user experience and engagement.
Publish reports to the Power BI Service, manage workspaces, and set up refresh schedules for seamless data updates.
Apply best practices for report performance and formatting, ensuring reports are both efficient and visually compelling.

If your team requires different topics, additional skills or a custom approach, our team will collaborate with you to adjust the course to focus on your specific learning objectives and goals.

Audience Profile

This course is ideal for professionals who want to start using Power BI to analyze and visualize data efficiently. It is designed for business analysts, data professionals, report developers, and anyone who needs to turn data into actionable insights.

Recommended Skills Before Attending:

Familiarity with Excel or other spreadsheet-based tools for data organization and analysis.
Basic understanding of data concepts, such as tables, relationships, and aggregations.
Experience working with business reports, dashboards, or data visualization tools is helpful but not required.

Suggested Learning Paths:

Business User/Report Developer

TTDPB01: Power BI: Essentials (2 days). Foundation for all learners.
TTDPB04: Power BI: Creating Reports (1 day). Learn to design and build insightful reports.
(Optional) TTDPB03: Power BI: Data Transformation & Modeling (2 days). If you need to clean and prepare data before reporting.

For Data Analysts & Power Users (Focus: Data Preparation, Analysis, and Advanced Calculations)

TTDPB01: Power BI: Essentials (2 days). Foundation for all learners.
TTDPB03: Power BI: Data Transformation & Modeling (2 days). Learn Power Query and data modeling best practices.
TTDPB05: Power BI: Mastering DAX for Data Analysis (1 day). Essential for writing complex calculations and optimizing analysis.
(Optional) TTDPB04: Power BI: Creating Reports (1 day). If they also need to design and present reports.

For Data Engineers (Focus: Data Preparation & Optimization)

TTDPB01: Power BI: Essentials (2 days). Foundation for all learners.
TTDPB03: Power BI: Data Transformation & Modeling (2 days). Core course for data cleaning and model structuring.
(Optional) TTDPB05: Power BI: Mastering DAX for Data Analysis (1 day). If you need to optimize performance with calculated measures.

Outline

Please note that this list of topics is based on our standard course offering, evolved from typical industry uses and trends. We will work with you to tune this course and level of coverage to target the skills you need most. Topics, agenda and labs are subject to change, and may adjust during live delivery based on audience skill level, interests and participation.

1. Introduction to the Power BI ecosystem

What is Power BI?
Overview of the Power BI Ecosystem
Power Query Editor; Power BI Desktop; Power BI Service
Tour of the Power BI Desktop
Tour of the Power Query Editor

2. The Extract, Transform, Load process

Introduction to the Power Query Editor
Clean and transform raw data using the ribbon
Mastering data types
Understanding some of the PQE 'rules'
Leveraging Applied Steps
Finding nulls/blanks/empties
Adding custom columns
Removing unnecessary columns
Introduction to the 'M' language
Modifying the M in the Formula Bar
Merging/appending data sources
Saving/applying transformations

3. Creating the data model

What is a data model? Why is it necessary?
Reviewing relationships/creating new ones
One to many; Many to many; One to one
Using basic DAX to add data
Measures; Calculated columns; Tables
Introduction to filter context and DAX

4. Enhancing the semantic model

Hierarchies
Hidden fields
Adding synonyms
Adding descriptions

5. Creating a date table

Why is a date table necessary?
Where is the date table created?
Creating a basic date table
Connecting in a date table

6. Creating a report

Formatting pages and using themes
Choosing and placing visuals
Formatting visuals
Visual header controls
Editing visual interactions
Slicers and the filter panel
Syncing slicers
Formatting tooltips/creating a tooltip page
Creating a drill through
Understanding and evaluating page/visual performance

7. Publish a report and semantic model

Publish the report to a designated workspace
Tour of the Power BI Service
Apps; Workspaces; My workspace
Review of the five types of a content a workspace can store
Reports; Dashboards; Datasets; Dataflows; Apps

8. Understanding Workspaces

Viewing a report or dashboard
Review of menu options
Understanding editing privileges in Workspaces
Review of menu options in edit mode
Editing a report and saving changes
Creating a dashboard
Setting up a refresh schedule
Creating an app and defining audiences
Publishing a report or dashboard to an app